has_many :thoughts

The first time I heard of Camping, was Evan Weaver’s talk about it at Philly on Rails. I’ll admit that, at first, I was a bit skeptical. It seemed silly to have something that duplicated some of what Rails already did.

But I just built my first little app with Camping and I am pleasantly surprised. It was a just a little weekend project: A page that lists things in and around Philly that my wife and I like to do and can suggest to friends visiting the area. It has only one view to List out the items and a simple Add and Remove action. The database is sqlite, my first time using it.

Building it in Rails would probably have been overkill. Now, I still haven’t figured out the best way to deploy this on our server: I’m thinking I’ll try FastCGI. But the development process has been a joy and I love how everything is just one file of about 100 lines of code. (Except for, of course, Ruby, Camping, ActiveRecord, and a bunch of other libraries.)

Markaby was the most interesting thing to learn. I haven’t compared it thoroughly to HAML, which I’ve tried and do like, but it seems to be quite similar and just as fun to write with.